<p>U.S</a>. pushes for more scientists, but the jobs aren’t there - The Washington Post</p>
<p>I always see these posts on here, but here is the truth. Nobody is holding a gun to your head and forcing you to get a PhD, do a post-doc, and try to find a tenure track academic position at a R1 university. And nobody is holding a gun to your head making you major in Chemistry, Biology, or Neuroscience. Also, having a STEM degree doesn’t entitle you to a job. But the glut of scientist who experience a bleak job market is really nothing new. This has been common knowledge for the last 20 years or so. My response is mostly geared toward scientist in industry. The academic job market has been in the ****ter for decades, and it is common knowledge that their are too few academic positions every year, for so many scientist. And you could also talk about the fact that PhDs from lower ranked programs don’t get a fair shot at the good academic jobs, because the schools want to only hire tenure track profs from prestigious univs. </p>
<p>This is partly because of globalization. My former company paid PhD chemist a starting salary of $90K, with full benefits. But they could go to China or Pakistan, find several PhD chemist from excellent US schools, and pay them roughly 60% of what they pay US PhDs. That saves the companies a boat load of money, and helps them develop new markets. </p>
<p>Another reason for the bleak scientific job market is the “outsourcing” of lab work. Several US companies are hiring contract labs to take over their routine analysis/method development/formulations work. An entire division’s work can be done by contractors from a lab company. These jobs were usually reserved for BS scientist. These jobs were hard to come by, but could pay very well. I made well over $60K as a BS chemist for my former company, and had full benefits. But the contractor gets benefits from the contract company, and they are paid ~$15-$16/hour.</p>
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<p>True enough, but at the same time, we must not ignore the marketing and cultural factors that induce people to choose to major in bio/chem/neuro in the first place, many such factors are (theoretically) under the control of society. As an analogy, while nobody is holding a gun to your head and forcing you to smoke, that doesn’t mean that we should categorically ignore the pernicious influence of tobacco marketing in stoking that desire to smoke. Nobody is holding a gun to your head forcing you to overeat to the point of obesity, but that doesn’t mean that we should categorically ignore the pernicious effect of fast food and junk food marketing. </p>
<p>We should also likewise not ignore the cultural ‘marketing’ factors that stoke the demand for people to major in bio/chem/neuro. As discussed in the article, the Obama administration is openly marketing science careers, launching a White House science fair where participants can meet the President and calling for US universities to produce more science graduates. {To be clear, this is not a partisan political statement, as I’m sure that I can find plenty of examples of Republicans also openly calling for more of our nation’s youths to study science.} As politically incorrect as it may be, perhaps those efforts should be curtailed because they’re only encouraging people to enter a field with mediocre job prospects. Perhaps the Obama Administration should replace its science fair with an engineering fair, or - perhaps cynically and surely politically untenably - a finance and management consulting fair. That is, after all, where the jobs actually are. {As for the absurdity of the spectacle of 10-year-old grade-school kids touting the tenets of diversified portfolios, business core competencies and strategic alignment, frankly, I’m not sure that’s significantly more absurd than having 21-year-old newly minted humanities college graduates with zero work experience touting those very same tenets…yet that happens right now.} </p>
<p>Colleges also effectively promote certain majors over others by simply providing easier grading curves and lower workloads for those majors. Generally speaking, biology, at least past the premed gauntlet, tends to be one of the easier majors in all of STEM - certainly more so than engineering. I can think of numerous engineering students who took relatively easy biology electives such as [a</a> survey on sports medicine](<a href=“http://ninjacourses.com/explore/course/5741/]a”>http://ninjacourses.com/explore/course/5741/) or [the</a> history of plants](<a href=“http://ninjacourses.com/explore/1/course/INTEGBI/181/]the”>http://ninjacourses.com/explore/1/course/INTEGBI/181/) to fulfill technical breadth requirements, but I struggle to think of many bio students who would take elective engineering coursework. If colleges want to encourage more students to enter the more marketable majors such as engineering, then those majors must be placed on a level grading and workload playing field as the other majors. </p>
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<p>True enough, but let’s not forget that the job market for any particular profession is generated by the sociopolitical choices of our own making. This is particularly true for academia itself which is largely divorced from the market forces of profit-seeking that you cite. </p>
<p>As a direct case in point, rather than spending $700 billion in capital injections and emergency investment vehicles along with the opening of below-market-rate Federal Reserve liquidity facilities worth hundreds of billions of dollars more to bail out the banking system in 2008, imagine if that sum total had instead been directed to scientific research? Undoubtedly that would have ignited an explosion of scientific careers. By comparison the total annual budget of the NSF is only ~$7 billion and the NIH is only $30 billion. {Deficit hawks would surely argue that the economic crash and resultant precarious financial state of the country precludes our expanding the budgets of the NSF/NIH further. Yet somehow we were able to afford extensive funds to bail out the banks…who just so happen to be the very entities who instigated the crash in the first place.}</p>
<p>The bottom line is that if the government wanted to generate more science jobs, it could do so at any time. It’s simply not a priority. {But apparently it is a priority to provide taxpayer funding for , say, sports stadiums, farm subsidies, or any myriad number of other programs, to say nothing about the bailout.} Personally, I think that what the Obama Administration (or a potential Republican Administration) ought to do, rather than attempt to stoke the supply of scientists, should instead stoke the demand for scientists. For example, rather than proposing that for every foreign-national STEM graduate of a US university, “We will staple a green card to your diploma” as [Mitt</a> Romney](<a href=“http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/2012/06/romney-offers-few-details-on-immigration-in-speech-to-latino-leaders.html]Mitt”>http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/2012/06/romney-offers-few-details-on-immigration-in-speech-to-latino-leaders.html) has proposed, how about boosting the funding of the NSF by an order of magnitude? Hey, if the government can conjure a trillion dollar bailout for the banking system in a matter of weeks, a relatively modest increase in science research isn’t that much to ask for.</p>